"We, the Media" review, part 2 -- the community

September 7 2004

As I left off the last blog entry about "We, the Media", I was musing about the Lotus community.
One of the big questions that Dan Gillmor's book raises for me is what the value of that community has been for the company I work for and the product I'm responsible for.  And how remarkably consistent that community has been over the years, in terms of mindset, despite changing members and technologies.

There are few business-oriented technologies that seem to inspire a quasi-religious devotion and fervor.  Lotus Notes, however, has always felt that way to me -- even before I came to work for Lotus in 1994.  There are probably a dozen reasons for it (and I suspect you'll give me a few in comments to this posting) --

  • the fact that it is collaborative software to begin with.  
  • The intensity and passion of an annual event like Lotusphere.  
  • The solid community formed on notes.net/LDD/developerWorks.  
  • User groups and community groups like DNUG and OpenNTF.  
  • The number of times that the product has been declared dead (survivor's instinct?).
  • The number of business partners and consultants who devote their whole business to Lotus Notes.  
  • E-newsletters, magazines, and bloggers.
The principles that Gillmor describes in his book as the new role of media are all exemplified by the way that the Lotus community interacts, and the way the community has contributed to the success of Lotus Notes.  Gillmor discusses all the new technologies -- blogs, RSS, SMS, etc.) -- that have facilitated the change in media and journalism.  I believe he missed an important one -- instant messaging.  Yes, we already had e-mail and we already had telephones, but IM has made me much more accessible.  How many of you who IM me would have picked up the phone and called someone at a vendor five years ago?  Even Bruce Elgort's quirky habit of IM'ing me random links has made me more responsive and aware of what's going on in the market.

This is why I've been willing to blog some topics that have been a little edgy.  We're still defining policy here -- the idea that a blogger perhaps was fired for something she blogged at Friendster last week is hopefully not the beginning of a trend, though you all know that others have tried to make it happen in other situations.  I said it then and will say it now -- I am willing to take a bit of a credibility risk at times to blog something that deserves some discussion.  

Sometimes I don't like the discussion -- last week's "Cheesecake" episode revealed that I still have a long way to go at my job to repair some very damaged relationships at a customer.  Still, that was one of the best discussions we've had on the blog -- because the customer was willing to describe their side of the story in public (though understandably they didn't sign a name or company name, and I'm OK with that in this narrow case).  I will be an order of magnitude better at my job as a result of the sometimes-painful story told in the 36 comments on that blog entry.

I wouldn't trade this kind of community for anything.  Having spent a long time watching my competition, I'm amazed that there is no similar sense of community participation.  In the last 45 days, there have been two or three topics on this weblog that directly raised questions about Microsoft's market behavior in competing with Lotus.  The first was the analyst report that predicted Microsoft Exchange gaining several points of market share at IBM's expense; the second, another sponsored paper that MS has posted from META Group; the third, the publication and then retraction of a 150+ page book on migrating applications from Notes to .NET.  The deafening silence from the competition in all three of these occurrences speaks volumes about how far Microsoft still has to go to "get" the new media world.  This despite the fact that Microsoft themselves, their PR agency, and one of the external technical editors of the book in incident #3 all read my weblog.  

Did anyone else notice that there is not a single Microsoft Exchange-focused blog or newsletter site that has written a single word about the disputed analyst reports, or about the application migration book?  Yet on the Lotus side, dozens of blogs, e-Pro, SearchDomino, etc. have all dedicated multiple days' worth of output to understanding the news and the issues raised by it.  Why the disparity?  Are Microsoft Exchange customers unaware of what happened (unlikely, since publications like eWeek and Network World wrote about some of it)?  Are they simply used to all these kinds of questionable market tactics, and don't blink an eye?  It is quite surprising, given the verbosity of blogs, newsletters, etc., that there hasn't been a single person -- Microsoft, MVP, customer, analyst, journalist -- to even attempt to tackle the story from another point of view.  

Robert Scoble is a Microsoftie who gets it -- when Longhorn was replanned two weeks ago, not only did he write about his thoughts on the replan, he linked to dozens of other bloggers who had commented on it -- both good and bad (including my blog entry on the topic).  Scoble isn't paid nearly enough for his contribution -- no, creation -- of a community around the Microsoft technologies he espouses.  Other Microsoft organizations could learn a lot from him.

I'll have more to say about this book in the coming days.  If you haven't gotten the message by now, I strongly suggest you buy and/or download it.

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category: Add/View Comments [13]

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  1. 1  Carl http://www.iminstant.com | 9/7/2004 12:11:33 PM

    "I'm amazed that there is no similar sense of community participation", it has always been my perception that there is, I think you'll find Microsoft has that community in newsgroups, for a long time they rewarded people that helped users in the Microsoft community with free software etc. MSDN also has a hugely committed community, and the Microsoft Developers are even tasked with helping answer developer questions. It's Not Notes.net but there are some very committed Microsoft Communities out there just using different technology.

    There are so many newsgroups out there for Microsoft though, you have to pick a couple and stick to that community.

  1. 2  dave www.magecraft.net | 9/7/2004 5:08:13 PM

    Don't you think there is something to the fact that Microsoft is "at the top of the heap" and that for a number of reasons (Radcati not the least of which) those of us in the "Lotus Position" tend to have a bit of an inferiority complex?

  1. 3  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 9/7/2004 5:52:39 PM

    Do you mean that Microsoft is "at the top of the heap" in this market specifically? Because they aren't according to Gartner's latest market share report and never have been.

    If you mean that they are in general, well, there's not much I can do when they own a monopoly in desktop/office tools. But perhaps that is where you infer the siege mentality from.

    Have you seen all the positive analyst and press coverage for Lotus Notes and Lotus Workplace this year? There's been tons. I've covered a lot of it on the blog. I guess that if some of it were better publicized within our customers, the "pack mentality" you describe in your elaboration on your own blog wouldn't be necessary.

  1. 4  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 9/7/2004 8:35:26 PM

    been thinking about this a bit all day. You are right -- the MVP program has, in some ways, as much or more sense of community as some of the Lotus world. I wonder why it hasn't ever made a big impact on Exchange or, more recently, SharePoint.

  1. 5  dave www.magecraft.net | 9/7/2004 11:55:31 PM

    guilty. i painted Microsoft's performance with a pretty broad brush. Clearly they're not on top in this market and your point about recent analyst coverage and the like is well made. The landscape definitely seems to have changed, although i'm not so sure that message has made all the way to the front lines.

  1. 6  Rock http://www.LotusGeek.com | 9/8/2004 8:54:46 AM

    I met Stephen Forte at an Advisor show. He is a kewl guy, and has a pretty good blog. His blog is similar to mine, in that it is a mix of personal and professional stuff - although his readership is a helluva lot higher than mine.

    Check it out...

    { Link }

  1. 7  Sagar  | 9/8/2004 10:27:19 AM

    Ed, I agree Notes.Net community is very very strong but the fact Notes.Net site(Notes DB) itself ( usability,speed,search etc) sucks. In fact many strong notes/domino pro moving away from it. Why LDD forums are similar to other IBM developerworks forums ( Websphere,portals etc), they are much better than Lotus' .nsf based forums.

  1. 8  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 9/8/2004 10:40:33 AM

    I access the discussion forums with a Notes client and have no real complaints about usability.

    What do you mean by LDD forums that are better? LDD = Lotus Developer Domain = .NSF-based forums.

  1. 9  Brian Green  | 9/8/2004 12:02:37 PM

    Sagar, you forget that LDD is a working Lab for the developers at Lotus. When using the site you're helping Lotus test their latest builds of Domino. The cluster is probably Windows, Linux, Solaris, and AIX.

  1. 10  Bernard Devlin  | 9/8/2004 8:02:12 PM

    Sagar, I'm not sure why you think Notes.net performance sucks. Last time I checked, the 46dom.nsf was 16gb in size (I expect it is around 18gb by now). Considering you are doing a text search on approx that amount of data, why do you think it is slow? I go there almost daily, and I find the responses to my _web_ queries (returning between 6 or a 1000 items) are no more than a few seconds... (never timed it specifically because it never seemed slow, but maybe 3 seconds). I really have no cause for complaint. In fact, I just did a cross-comparison with notes.net, msdn.microsoft.com, and a developerworks search: notes.net was the fastest (admittedly this is in no way extensive or exhaustive or scientific...) Given that I find it just about the most useful resource on the internet, I really am curious to know why you fault this site.

    I could not disagree more strongly that searches within the rest of IBM are better than notes.net searches. I have consistently been able to find information more easily by searching Notes.net than the rest of IBM. I find laughable the (minimal) instructions about how to even construct a search term on many of the main IBM searches (something along the lines of "+wordOne +wordTwo -wordThree". With these other IBM searches I often end up with search results of 10,000 or more, many duplicates, and by page three I have given up...

    Notes.net is one of my reasons for sticking with Notes...

  1. 11  Sagar  | 9/9/2004 8:42:50 AM

    I was just comparing Notes.Net with other IBM developerworks forums eg forum for websphere ({ Link } They have better user interface. Most annoying thing in notes.net forum is that you have to visit each responses seperately,you just can not view all the responses in one page.

  1. 12  Christopher Byrne http://www.controlscaddy.com/ | 9/9/2004 9:45:34 AM

    Sagar,

    The response thing I can see and often get frustrated with as well (oh the power of Gmail:-) ).

    But as far as searching. I have confidence that if I do a serach on LDD, I will find what I want fairly quickly. On other IBM sites, many times it feels like throwing up a HUGE pile of hay and that before the day ends I will have gotten closer to that needle. And I have the exact same problem with most MS Searches, especially when trying to find good help files or samples for tools/code that I can use.

  1. 13  Bernard Devlin  | 9/11/2004 6:05:02 AM

    @Sagar, well, I'm afraid I even disagree about the usability of the developerworks page. I put it to you that if that forum received the number of posts that Notes.net receieves, then posters are unlikely to get a response to their initial posts. The link you provide points to a 80kb page where each initial post is written in full. In order to even see any post I might be interested in helping with I have to scan through the text of all of them (more work for me, so less likely that the requester gets the help they require). Moreover, there are only 15 initial posts on that page. before it segments off to the next page. In a page of that size on Notes.net one can see the subject line of approximately 80 posts. And one can more easily see which see which posts have received no responses, and therefore go to help those people first. Since the same page size gives a view of 4x more requests for help, I would argue that Notes.net users are more likely to receive responses. And in fact that would appear to be borne out in reality: the developerworks site you link to has approximately 4000 topics with approximately 6000 replies, so thats an averate of roughly 1.5 replies per topic. I can't tell you so quickly on the numbers for Notes.net but looking down the second page in on Notes.net (46dom.nsf) one finds 253 replies to approx 100 entries, so 2.5 replies per request. And, since (e.g.) 46dom.nsf goes back about 8 years (assuming it covers all R4 releases) and it is easily searchable then it is actually quite likely that the ratio of people finding answers by searching is massively higher than those that actually request help.

    As far as I am concerned Notes.net is one of the important reasonss for using Notes. Whenever I come across a problem that I cannot see the immediate answer to, 90% of the time I can find a solution (or see that it is a problem for other people and I shouldn't waste any more time tackling it head-on) within 10 minutes of going to Notes.net. In 6 years of using Notes and Domino I have never once called on Lotus for support.